A Campus Awakens In a Corner of Camden

By JOSH BENSON

Published: September 26, 2004

ASK the provost of the Rutgers campus here about this troubled city's long-awaited reawakening, and he'll show you the door. And the trim around the ceiling. And the newly restored floor.

''I think this is a great example of what's happening here,'' said the provost, Roger J. Dennis, gesturing at his office in a recently restored 19th-century brick building on Cooper Street just blocks from the Delaware River.

After decades in a nondescript administrative building tucked away on a corner of the 40-acre campus, the provost's office relocated last fall to its current home on one of Camden's main streets in a building that was falling apart just a few years ago.

Along with an increasing local student presence -- from about 4,500 in 1996 to almost 6,000 today -- and several new retail businesses to serve them, the school's administrators and local officials hope that the renovated administrative building represents something bigger: the birth of a true university district for a city that is in the process of spending hundreds of millions dollars to reinvent itself. But if the provost's office is a symbol of recovery, it also stands for something else. For all the improvements it has undergone, the office still stands across the street from one of the city's many boarded-up buildings, and just blocks from streets teeming with drugs, violence and despair.

''We realize the challenge we face,'' said Mr. Dennis, who took over as provost in 1997. ''It's like what Winston Churchill said: this is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning of Camden's redevelopment.''

Camden has indeed seen the beginning of a comeback from its almost unfathomable depths in the 1980's and 90's, when corruption, crime and crushing poverty made it one of the most dire of urban settings in the nation, and the city became famous for its ''mischief night'' -- an annual event that was, essentially, an arson-fest. For years Camden had one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the United States, and it remains the poorest city in New Jersey.

During that time, the Rutgers campus here became something of a frontier outpost for students who commuted from the suburbs, walling itself off from the neighborhood, seizing land and developing a reputation among the city's beleaguered residents as a hostile occupying power.

But these days efforts by Rutgers to make capital improvements and attract more students to live on or near its campus -- which extends from the Delaware River on its west to Broadway on the east -- are beginning to have an effect on the local economy, from the upscale private housing and cheap rental units on its fringes to the small retail businesses that have opened to serve the growing number of the school's 5,800 students and 800 employees.

''Going back to the years when they started acquiring property, there was very much an adversarial relationship between Rutgers and neighborhoods around it,'' said Melvin R. Primas, the former mayor and current state-appointed chief operating officer of the city. ''More recent history has been one of everyone viewing them as a major asset to downtown. They've become tremendously good corporate citizens.''

Yet as much of an effort as Rutgers has made, over the years Camden's institutions of higher education have not always had the stabilizing impact that they have had in other troubled urban areas. Unlike Newark's Rutgers campus, which played an important role in anchoring that city through its own tough times, Camden, which has a total population of about 80,000, has never had a large, captive constituency of students to act as a buffer against middle-class flight. (Newark has approximately 40,000 students in its various universities, as opposed to the approximately 8,500 who attend Rutgers, Rowan University and Camden County College in Camden).

Nor does Camden have a corporate presence comparable to Newark, or the jobs and stability that go along with them. The city's economy probably peaked more than a half-century ago, when the population was 125,000 and it was home to a flourishing shipbuilding business and other providers of manufacturing jobs like RCA Victor and the Campbell Soup Company. While Campbell's still maintains its corporate headquarters here, the jobs for processing canned goods as well as building ships and making phonographs have disappeared. What's more, this city is still struggling with a reputation for crime and violence that to a large extent repels potential suburban visitors despite the growing riverfront development that includes the Tweeter Center, the state aquarium, the Battleship New Jersey and Campbell's Field, where the minor league Camden Riversharks play under the shadow of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Those problems are not going to be erased any time soon: Camden had 44 murders in 2003, recapturing its unenviable title as the region's most dangerous city, and this year there were 10 homicides in July alone.

''There's only one major institution there, in Camden,'' said Steven Diner, Mr. Dennis' counterpart at Rutgers-Newark. ''Downtown Camden basically is Rutgers-Camden, and that's only half the size of Rutgers-Newark. The city doesn't have nearly as much of an infrastructure as Newark has, or downtown institutions or activities going on. And there aren't nearly as many people who pour in every day to work. I think, given all this, that what Roger Dennis and Rutgers have done is even more remarkable.''